Whereas EAS tags are typically of a "passive" type, i.e., do not carry therewith a source of power but rather, respond to incident energy to reradiate the same or a permutation thereof, there are known EAS tags which are of "active" type, carrying therewith a battery or like source of electrical power. Advantage attends the on-board, self-powering capacity, since the tag can thereby be of the so-called "smart" or "intelligent" variety, such as is disclosed in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,686,513, which is incorporated herein by this reference thereto.
The tag of the '513 patent, by reason of its on-board power supply, has capacity for processing coded, received messages to assume responsive diverse states and to exhibit different operational characteristics corresponding with such states, thereby expanding the operational states of the tag as contrasted with the passive-type tags.
One concern attending active tags is that of power source conservation and measures are known to address this concern. A version of commercial tag of the common assignee, Sensormatic Electronics Corporation, thus included, as a part of the printed circuit board (PCB), which incorporates circuitry related to received message decoding and tag state assignment, electrically conductive traces adapted to be interconnected by movement of an electrically conductive member upon tag orientation change. Thus, one of the states of the '513 patent tag is "Sleep", wherein its circuitry is dormant, conserving battery life. On movement of the article to which the tag is attached, the intention of the commercial tag under discussion was to "re-awaken" on interconnection of the electrical traces by movement of the electrically conductive member. To the extent that movement of the tag did not insure certainty of such trace interconnections, this prior art arrangement was not as effective as desired in preserving power source integrity while at the same time re-awakening tags, i.e., rendering the tag electrical circuitry active.